Forget nuclear winter. Think Covid winter. Again. The spreading Omicron variant infects landing pages this morning from Sydney to London to Los Angeles. The Supreme Court does not hear the Mississippi abortion case that threatens Roe until Wednesday. For now, Omicron rules.
New Omicron variant spreads globally amid fears of winter COVID surge reads the Los Angeles Times. “U.S. health officials said it will probably take two weeks to fully determine the level of threat but pushed coronavirus booster shots as a key first stage in the battle.”
Omicron variant now in North America as first cases found in Canada says the Washington Post. Health officials have identified two cases in Ontario. Of course it is in the U.S. already. It has just not been spotted yet.
Fauci: US could face ‘fifth wave’ of Covid as Omicron variant nears declares The Guardian in case you’d lost track. (I had.) The White House’s chief medical adviser, Anthony Fauci, hopes existing vaccines will “provide a degree of protection against severe cases of Covid.”
First image of Omicron shows many more mutations than Delta reports Agence France-Presse. But don’t panic yet, says AFP. “This does not automatically mean that these variations are more dangerous, just that the virus has further adapted to the human species by generating another variant,” a team of Italian researchers said.
Could Omicron be our way out? The Sydney Morning Herald echoes those Italian researchers with this interesting and hopeful observation on the outbreak:
Could the emergence of Omicron, possibly a more infectious, less virulent variant of coronavirus, be a good thing for public health? Some of our leading infectious disease experts, while stressing it is too early to make a call, are daring to hope.
Since the start of the pandemic, epidemiologists have thought this might be our way out, that the virus could eventually mutate into a more benign form that continues to spread but kills fewer people and sends fewer of us to hospital.
This is what happened to the H1N1 influenza virus and it may explain the origins of the common cold, a coronavirus some virologists have linked to the deadly Russian Flu pandemic of the late 19th century.
The early indications from South Africa, where Omicron already appears to be replacing Delta as the dominant strain, is that the radically mutated Omicron could be the SARS-CoV-2 variant experts have been waiting for.
“We don’t know yet, but there are a few clues coming out that it may be less virulent,” says University of Melbourne epidemiologist Tony Blakely. “Whilst it is all a bit nerve-racking at the moment, it might work out to our advantage.”
“The measure of success is keeping people out of hospital, keeping people safe and at the same time, opening up the economy to keep people in work and keep businesses open,” says New South Wales Premier Dominic Perrottet.
(Politico is too busy with the D.C. soap opera to invest much of its attention in people’s health.)